Here are All 5 Decks That Sparky Plays in MTG Arena Ranked

Last updated on October 17, 2023

MTG Arena Sparky

MTG Arena has become the place to play MTG online, and it supports a wide variety of formats between Standard, Explorer, and Limited. These formats are usually played against real opponents online, and those opponents play good decks and good cards to beat you. But if you're new to the game, which we all were at some point, you’ll probably want an easy start, a safe place to train and learn the rules of the game at a slower pace. Fortunately, MTG Arena has a robust “Learn to Play” mode and a “Bot Match” feature.

When you play in the Bot Match, you can test any deck you want against an AI called Sparky, and Sparky will go easier on you than online players. Sparky's decks are very weak, composed mostly of commons and simple cards. Sparky has access to 5 different decks, one for each color (white, blue, black, red, and green).

I’ve got all there’s to know about Sparky’s decks, like their decklists and their strategies, and I’ll rank them from worst to best. If you like the style of deck Sparky plays against you, I’ll also suggest how to improve them decks just by switching a few cards.

Let’s go!

#5. Black

Witch's Familiar | Illustration by Jack Wang

Sparky’s black deck is the weakest one. The card quality is very low, especially on the creature side. It’s got interesting removal spells like Murder, but then you’ve got very weak creatures like Scathe Zombies or Krovikan Scoundrel which are bad by today’s common standards. How does this deck win? It’s got no big splashy win conditions or relevant evasive creatures. A single Nightmare would already be a better win condition and solve most of the deck’s problems.

To make this deck more resilient and more capable of winning games here are a few changes:

• Add 4 Deathbloom Thallid and 4 Vampire Sovereign, removing the Scathe Zombies and Krovikan Scoundrel.
• Add 4 Village Rites, replacing 4 Swamp.
• Up the Murder count to 3 and add 2 Go for the Throat, taking off 1 Cruel Cut, 1 Unlikely Aid and 1 Skeletal Archer.
• Replace Raise Dead with Crawl from the Cellar

#4. White

Sanctuary Cat | Illustration by David Palumbo

Sparky’s white deck is a creature-centric deck with a lifegain subtheme. Charmed Stray has lifelink and works well in multiples, while Hallowed Priest grows whenever you gain life. Impassioned Orator can give you life in little increments when creatures enter the battlefield. To win, this deck can rely on creatures enchanted with auras or a Serra Angel that attacks for four in the air. It’s a classic White Weenie-style deck. It’s easy to beat this deck by having better creatures. Just a 6/6 or 5/5 with trample already gives you a much better board position. The way you lose is by not having board presence or getting beat by an angel or a Fencing Ace with an aura on it.

To improve this deck:

• Remove 2 Sanctuary Cat, 4 Shrine Keeper, 3 Loxodon Line Breaker, and 7 Plains to make room for 12 cards.
• Add 4 Ajani's Pridemate, 3 Fencing Ace, and 4 Healer's Hawk.
• Cut Confront the Assault and Spiritual Guardian to add two more Serra Angel.

#3. Green

Baloth Packhunter | Illustration by Nestor Ossandon

Sparky’s green deck is all about ramping into big creatures. This deck does a nice job of showing that green wants mana acceleration with cards like Ilysian Caryatid and Woodland Mystic. And you’ve got strong creatures in Affectionate Indrik and Sentinel Spider. The deck folds to removal spells and sweepers in a big way, so if you want to defeat this deck, you’ll need some removal for the creatures.

To make this deck better:

• Replace the 4 Woodland Mystic with 4 Llanowar Elves.
• Play 3 Llanowar Visionary instead of 3 Generous Stray.
• Add 1 Baloth Packhunter and cut 1 Sentinel Spider.
• Replace 2 Rumbling Baloth and 4 Treetop Warden with 3 Warden of the Woods and 3 Colossaw Dreadmaw.
• Cut 6 Forest to replace them with 4 Thrashing Brontodon and 2 Colossal Majesty.

#2. Blue

Warden of Evos Isle | Illustration by Nils Hamm

Sparky’s blue deck plays a flying creature or two and attacks its opponent until they’re dead while defending against their creatures’ attacks with high toughness creatures like Wall of Runes. There are also flying matters cards, with cards like Warden of Evos Isle and Winged Words.

It’s already a nice deck, but you can streamline it:

• Cut are 4 Zephyr Gull, 3 Armored Whirl Turtle, and 2 Sworn Guardian.
• Add 4 Sigiled Starfish, 1 more Cloudkin Seer, and 4 Lantern Bearer.
• Replace 2 River's Favor with 2 Curiosity.
• Up the count of Winged Words and Waterskin Shaman to 4 each.
• Add 2 Lofty Denial, cut 1 Unsummon, and cut 4 Island.

#1. Red

Teen Street Cadet | Illustration by Jarel Threat

Sparky's Red deck is the best of the bunch in my opinion because it's the most aggressive and punishing one. If you stumble at the beginning of the game with your tapped lands or mana screw, you'll have a hard time. This deck is a goblin-themed deck where lots of cards are creatures with haste or creatures that make goblin tokens. Raid Bombardment is a nice one in this deck because this deck can trigger it anytime a small creature attacks. Another strong play from this deck is to cast Goblin Gathering after Goblin Gathering, creating a big token army.

To improve this deck:

• Remove all Fearless Halberdier, Hurloon Minotaur, and Reduce to Ashes, then cut  7 Mountain.
• Add 1 more Goblin Gathering, 2 more Raid Bombardment, and 3 Cavalcade of Calamity.
• Add 4 Battle-Cry Goblin, 4 Goblin Warchief, and 2 Volley Veteran.

These changes turn an unfocused aggressive red deck into a real focused goblin tribal deck.

How to Get Good Decks Using Arena Tutor

OK, so are you looking to build your first deck, or possibly improve even more on these lists?

Deckbuilding is challenging even for MTG veterans, so if you want to improve decks or build new decks, there’s nothing wrong with taking a look at MTG websites and copying good decklists. If you want an awesome and totally free tool get inspiration for new builds, you should have our tool Arena Tutor installed. Here’s how you can get awesome decks with Arena Tutor.

When you open Arena Tutor, go to the meta deck page. This is a way to see the decks with better win rates, decks with higher percentages for the meta, or decks that you can easily craft with your cards and wildcards. You can see that the Black Midrange deck has a nice 56.1% win rate in current Standard, and if I wanted to craft it I’d have to spend just four rare wildcards. Arena Tutor made me realize that I have the necessary tools to build the Black Midrange deck and that it’s putting up good results.

After selecting the deck, I can see which cards I’m missing, import the decklist to MTG Arena, and craft the necessary cards. Simple as that. Now I have a new competitive deck to play!

Wrap Up

Arena Rector (Judge) | Illustration by Jason Rainville

Playing against Sparky is one of the easiest ways to learn to play MTG and test new decks, especially if you get decklists online and you're not sure about the rules and card interactions. If you're not that confident about your MTG abilities, it's nice to play against Sparky because it makes poor decisions, and the decks it plays aren’t that strong or optimized. Although it's very easy to beat Sparky, it’s totally possible to lose against it because you have a bad draw or get mana screwed. If you lose to Sparky, don’t think you’re the worst player. It’s just MTG’s variance.

Do you test your decks against Sparky? Would you like Sparky to play better decks so it would be more of a challenge? Let me know the answers in the comments section below or in our Draftsim Discord.

If your favorite way of playing MTG is on MTG Arena, no matter how experienced with the game you are, you got to have Arena Tutor by your side. It tracks your MTG Arena collection, helps you to find top-tier decks that you can easily build on Arena, helps you draft, and much more.

Stay safe folks, and thanks for reading!